Paul Adrian Fried / HAMLET'S BIBLE

Gustav Klimt, Death of Romeo & Juliet, "Theatre of Shakespeare" (1886) from historic Burgtheater, Vienna, via UK Shakespeare Magazine, Twitter. Shakespeare has many plays with suicides in them. Most famously, perhaps, is the dual suicide of Romeo and Juliet. Lady Macbeth kills herself, as do Anthony and Cleopatra, Brutus, Cassius, the wife of Brutus, Timon of Athens, and a daughter of King Lear. In Lear, the blinded Gloucester wants to commit suicide by jumping off a cliff, but his son in disguise sets it up to make his father believe he has been miraculously saved. Othello kills himself after he realizes he has been tricked into killing his wife by Iago (whose name is a Spanish form of James, which makes sense considering how the English hated the Spanish after the Armada, and the Jesuits, based in Spain; but which creates cognitive dissonance when we think of how the play was written while a king named James occupied the English throne). In Hamlet, the prince c...

For those of you who have followed my posts about Francisco and Bernardo, the first two characters on stage in Hamlet , and my research regarding the lives of the saints after whom they may have been named (Francis of Assisi and Bernard of Clairvaux), and if you are LinkedIn members, you might be interested in a recent post by Pino Blasone, essayist, teacher of Latin and philosophy, cultural journalist, writer of verse and fiction, and on LinkedIn, often reflecting on art and art history : https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6515518607085051904 If you have not read my posts on Francis and Bernard, you can type into the search bar at the top right of this blog, the name "Francisco" and also (new search) the name "Bernardo" (or Francis, Bernard) and you'll find them quickly. You can also look for those posts I have labeled "Francisco & Bernardo" by using the label list search from the drop-down menu in the upper left on this blo...

Two books in roughly the past half-century have done a good job identifying the flaws in sloppy or superficial Christian criticism that tries too hard at times to find Christ-figures everywhere. These have had good and bad effects on the way that people who are less aware of the field of Shakespeare and Religion sometimes perceive it. On the one hand, Christians should not proselytize sloppily through Shakespeare, finding religious allegories anywhere or everywhere, and if they point out religious themes or biblical echoes, they should cite evidence to support their claims. Fair enough. But some of this criticism of the Christian theologizers is fraught with its own flaws and distortions, as well as having unintended negative effects. Roland Mushat Frye was a scholar-in-residence at the Folger Shakespeare Library, and his book, Shakespeare and Christian Doctrine (1963), is often cited. Chapter 1 (19-42) is called "Theologizing Analyses: The School of Knight," named after...

[Illustration: Bottom the Weaver from Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream , by Arthur Rackham, 1939] In the last few years, I have been reading as many books and essays about Shakespeare and religion as I can get my hands on, and among the many things that strike me is this: Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, and other critics can read the same text and come away with very different interpretations, even paying attention to the same details. Of course, this makes perfect sense, and Shakespeare implies that this will happen through certain lines in Hamlet. Readers or viewers bring different assumptions to their experience of the plays, and they often exercise a kind of confirmation bias, noticing details that confirm their assumptions or biases. We all do this, of course, and in part, it's what makes academic research interesting: to discover what people with different experiences, assumptions, and biases make of the same text. But when you've been wrestling with th...

In May of 2018, I posted a retrospective with links to some of my favorite and most popular posts here: https://pauladrianfried.blogspot.com/2018/05/retrospective-5-14-18.html This second retrospective picks up around then and goes forward to early March of 2019, with my most important posts, below. They are all also available on LinkedIn, but it's just much harder to access them.... Thanks for reading and for your support! Christianity's central mysteries & teachings in #HAMLET 1.1 FOR SHAKESPEARE, MUST AN ALLUSION TO THE INCARNATION IMPLY A DIVINE INFANCY NARRATIVE? USING SCRIPTURE AS A WEAPON in Hamlet 1.2 TO INTEND, OR NOT TO INTEND? WHICH HAMLET? HAMLET’S WINDOWS TO OTHER TEXTS DID JOHN SHAKESPEARE'S FAMILY SUFFER UNDER A GOVERNMENT PROGRAM TO HARASS CATHOLICS? HAMLET: PRIEST, PROPHET, & KING (part 1) Hamlet: Priest, Prophet, King (part 2) IS HAMLET REMORSELESS AFTER KILLING POLONIUS? “WHERE’S THE BODY” in HAMLET 4.3? IN HAMLET,...

After reading David Kaula’s essay, “Hamlet and the Image of Both Churches” I also read his book, Shakespeare and the Archpriest Controversy (Mouton 1975). The archpriest controversy was a conflict between Rome and the Jesuits, on the one hand, and the remaining local Catholic “secular” priests on the other, which involved a pamphlet war between the Jesuits and the seculars regarding who should lead the Catholics still worshiping in secret. The pamphlet war was encouraged by Robert Cecil and others to divide and conquer the Catholic opposition, so as to avoid popular support for a Catholic successor to Elizabeth. It's an interesting book and makes some good points. Some writers in various ages have given the impression of English history that England broke from a corrupt Roman Catholic religious authority, and that a popular majority throughout the country suddenly embraced their liberation and a more righteous and true faith in the English Church. But Cecil’s efforts to divi...